I've modified an earlier additive (sine) synthesizer to do something a bit different.

My previous additive synth (32 sine oscillators) was designed to produce periodic waveforms and used the sine oscillators as harmonics, i.e., each oscillator has a frequency that is an integer multiple of the fundamental pitch.

Blue Hell suggested the use on inharmonic partials (not harmonics). These are calculated using multiplication factors other than integers to produce partials of higher frequency than the fundamental pitch. He also suggested that a scale might be constructed out of the partial frequencies (or lower octaves of them).

The result was interesting gong and bell like sounds, metallic sounds. I had been reading that gongs and bells can have inharmonic partial stucture and that because of this structure it can be difficult to hum the pitch of the gong because of the strong influence of partials above the fundamental. This seems true of the output of my synthesizer as well.

Time flies like a banana.Fruit flies when you're having fun.BTW, Do these genes make my ass look fat?corruptio optimi pessimaLast edited by JovianPyx on Wed Mar 28, 2012 12:01 pm; edited 2 times in total

This synthesizer was small enough that I was able to double up on the hardware and modify the MIDI controller to make a duophonic synthesizer. Basically, 2 monosynths each with 32 sine oscillators. The sample rate is still 250 kHz.

It sounds much better than the monophonic version because you can play 2 notes at once or in rapid succession and don't get a weird pitch burp sound.

The demo is bits of playing, pause, bits of playing, pause, etc. The pauses were actually a bit longer as I was changing the patch. Each of the segments have some settings different. There is also a 1 second echo effect.

What kind of filtering do you do the the sine wave to give it the bell type of sound? Is it just the cross modulation from 32 oscillators?

This synthesizer has no filter.

It's much simpler, all I do is add the outputs together - imagine a 32 channel mixer, each with a sine wave that let's you control the frequency. It's digital in this case, but it works the same way. I can set the levels and frequencies of these 32 sine oscillators.

The reason it's like a bell is because the sine wave frequencies intentionally do not have an integer relationship to one another. This produces a non-periodic waveform, i.e., it doesn't have a waveshape like tri or saw. Metal bells often if not usually have partials instead of harmonics. The partials are sinewaves that don't relate to a fundamental in a simple integer way. A sawtooth, for example, has harmonics that are 2x 3x 4x 5x...etc. of the fundamental frequency. My synth is designed to make other relationships instead of integer.

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